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First off, I want to wish everybody who is reading this a happy new year and that hopefully things will be better for you and yours for the coming year. Of course nobody knows what the future holds, but I suppose one can hope that things will be better, if only slightly.

Onto my reading resolutions. I make both general and reading resolutions each year and hopefully try to hold true to it. And as usual, I fall short. But I hope with this entry I can get my reading goals accomplished as much as possible.

My first one is to read 50 books for the year. This has be a resolution that I have had for the past 4 years and have fallen short every year. I managed to read at least 38 books this year, which for me is actually quite a good number, considering I had times where I wasn't reading much or didn't read much at all or didn't feel like reading.

Related to my first goal, my second goal this year to read 15,000 pages. I believe I got close one year, but this year I reall…

Nathan Hurst hated Christmas. For the rest of the world it was a day of joy and celebration; for Nathan it was simply a reminder of the event that destroyed his childhood until a snowstorm, a cancelled flight, and an unexpected meeting with a young mother and her very special son would show him that Christmas is indeed the season of miracles.

Thoughts: It was a nice diversion from the heavier material that I had been reading and took me a couple of days to finish. I really enjoyed the book and was one of the better ones of his that I have read this Christmas season. It was an interesting premise and I quite liked it.

Bottom line: Not disappointed by the book, in fact I was impressed more than I expected. A lovely book.

Generations of readers have been enchanted by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—the most cheerful ghost story ever written, and the unforgettable tale of Ebenezer Scrooge’s moral regeneration. Written in just a few weeks, A Christmas Carol famously recounts the plight of Bob Cratchit, whose family finds joy even in poverty, and the transformation of his miserly boss Scrooge as he is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.

From Scrooge’s “Bah!” and “Humbug!” to Tiny Tim’s “God bless us every one!” A Christmas Carol shines with warmth, decency, kindness, humility, and the value of the holidays. But beneath its sentimental surface, A Christmas Carol offers another of Dickens’s sharply critical portraits of a brutal society, and an inspiring celebration of the possibility of spiritual, psychological, and …

Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin.
Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.

Reason that I read this book: I read it for a challenge on Goodreads. I had intended to read it in November, but got around to it this past month.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!﻿

I'm no sympathizer with theives, but sometimes I feel bad for them for succumbing to a momentary lapse of judgment or, at least, of conscience. Oftentimes they have bigger problems, an addiction or a bad debt. Most disturbing are the sociopaths, unencumbered by conscience or guilt, just taking what they feel entitled to. These people feel no remorse -- only rage at me for getting in their way. In fact, they usually blame me for their problems. In their twisted se…

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!﻿

Once I had learned o f Miss Martha's sorry circumstances, after I knew that she had asked for me, for Isabelle, I felt compelled to see her and to have her see me. I grew convinced that if she saw me, she would become well again. ~p. 188, The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

Maus is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive.

Reason I read this book: Read this book because I am doing it for a few challenges on Goodreads.

Thoughts: I really liked it. I hadn't read the book in 9 years and forgot how powerful the book is. While it is a lot like Holocaust survivor stories, it isn't a lot like them. There is an uniqueness that the story is told and how it is expressed. It is a brilliant book. I probably sh…

Title: Revolution
Author: Jennifer Donnelly
Published: 2010
Pages: 472
Genre: Historical Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 4/5 BROOKLYN: Andi Alpers is on the edge. She's angry at her father for leaving, angry at her mother for not being able to cope, and heartbroken by the loss of her younger brother, Truman. Rage and grief are destroying her. And she's about to be expelled from Brooklyn Heights' most prestigious private school when her father intervenes. Now Andi must accompany him to Paris for winter break.

PARIS: Alexandrine Paradis lived over two centuries ago. She dreamed of making her mark on the Paris stage, but a fateful encounter with a doomed prince of France cast her in a tragic role she didn't want-and couldn't escape.

Two girls, two centuries apart. One never knowing the other. But when Andi finds Alexandrine's diary, she recognizes something in her words and is moved to the point of obsession. There's comfort and distraction for Andi in the journa…

Blurb:Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!﻿

It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps with the borders of this country. The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out. ~ p. 8&9, Th…

What is one of your literary pet peeves? Is there something that writers do that really sets your teeth on edge? Be specific, and give examples if you can.

One thing that really sets me off is if the writing is bad and predictable. Nothing sets me off if the writing is bad and it seems as though there is no flow to the story. It feels like the author is trying to hard to get a story across or that the author is either really too interested in the subject and clearly doesn't have a sense for what the reader may think. There is nothing like reading a book, or a section in a book, that feels tedious and unejoyable. Another thing I have a pet peeve with is when an author goes on and on and on, when the point has already made several pages ago. It feels like the author is trying to get a point across too much and at times makes me feel like not reading them again, even if they are a good writer. I want a book to envelope me and take me away to another place, not make me so dist…

Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Reason that I read this book: I read this book because I had really enjoyed reading Blankets by Craig Thompson and also because I wanted to read another graphic novel (I am currently up to 4 with the completion of this …

She was my first kiss. My first love. She was a little match girl who could see the future in the flame of a candle. She was a runaway who taught me more about life than anyone has before or since. And when she was gone my innocence left with her.

As I begin to write, a part of me feels as if I am awakening something best left dead and buried, or at least buried. We can bury the past, but it never really dies. The experience of that winter has grown on my soul like ivy climbing the outside of a home, growing until it begins to tear and tug at the brick and mortar.

I pray I can still get the story right. My memory, like my eyesight, has waned with age. Still, there are things that become clearer to me as I grow older. This much I know: too many things were kept secret in those days. Things that never should have been hidden. And things that should have.

The Christmas List by Richard Paul Evans Blurb: Dear Reader,
When I was in seventh grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Johnson, gave our class the intriguing (if somewhat macabre) assignment of writing our own obituaries. Oddly, I don''t remember much of what I wrote about my life, but I do remember how I died: in first place on the final lap of the Daytona 500. At the time, I hadn''t considered writing as an occupation, a field with a remarkably low on-the-job casualty rate.

What intrigues me most about Mrs. Johnson''s assignment is the opportunity she gave us to confront our own legacy. How do we want to be remembered? That question has motivated our species since the beginning of time: from building pyramids to putting our names on skyscrapers.
As I began to write this book, I had two objectives: First, …

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!﻿

Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way …

Good morning. Hope you had a great sleep and are waiting to go. I realize that this post is a little late. I had a late night due to the fact that I watched TV a little too late last night. Anyways, for those that have started, I hope you are snuggled with your favourite books somewhere in your home. I am going to send some money to the local Christmas Bureau sometime this week and then the week before Christmas Bureau bring down something to their offices (probably a game of somesort). Hope you are having fun.

My blog post is going to about a Christmas tradition that most years my family does.

I don't know when it started, but it was when I was a kid that my dad recorded an airing of the black&white version of the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol. It got to the point that the VHS tape that my dad had got a little warped and so he would try to tape it on Christmas Eve so that we could watch the movie on Christmas Day. I don't know why it had to be the B&W version, but I guess one of the scenes was a little more creepier than in the colourized version and so it was the B&W version that we have watched. My dad likes the scene with the third ghost so much that when he got a dark green housecoat one year, he mimicked the third ghost

One Christmas, about 5 or 6 years ago, I was in a local video/music store just looking around one afternoon and found a redone version of A Christmas Carol in B&W on DVD. I let my dad record the B&W version that was playing o…

I suppose it had something to do with the fact that it talks about moving on and not to be sad about one's passing. While the poem is morbid in nature, it does have a rather positive spin on death. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was getting out of William Butler Yeats phase and needed something a little more positive spin on things. It was also just a poem that appealed to me in general.

Another poem I particularly like is Dylan Thomas' poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. I honestly don't know why I like, but probably because its one of the first pieces of poetry that I read that wasn't a typical romantic poem. It sort of goes against of how poetry should be and expresses how many people really feel about death and that we try to fight death as much as possible and deny its existence for ourselves.

Friday's question is....
What do you do besides reading/reviewing as a hobby?

I follow sports, mainly the NFL and the NHL. I honestly don't know why I became such a sports junkie, but I think it had something to do with the fact that I was exposed to sports on a regular basis when I was quite young. In fact, when I was in elementary school, I came home one day and told my mom that we had sung the "hockey song" in school that day. My mom apparently was confused and eventually figured out that the "hockey song" was in fact the Canadian national anthem (I had probably heard it on a broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday and just assumed it was the "hockey song"). My favourite teams? From the NFL, I would have to say it is the Seattle Seahawks and from the NHL, it would be the Vancouver Canucks and the Montréal Canadiens.

"What very popular and hyped book in the blogosphere did you NOT enjoy and how did you feel about posting your r…

Booking Through Thursday has posted an interesting question: How about First Editions? Are they something special? Or “just another book” to you? I personally don't really care whether a book is a first edition or not, but then again, it depends on the book. The most important thing about the book is whether I enjoy the book or not.

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen Blurb: For eighteen years Fran Benedetto kept her secret, hid her bruises. She stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father, and because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son's face, Fran finally made a choice-and ran for both their lives.
Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. In this place she uses a name that isn't hers, watches over her son, and tries to forget. For the woman who now calls herself Beth, every day is a chance to heal, to put together the pieces of her shattered self. And every day she waits for Bobby to catch up to her. Bobby always said he would never let her go, and despite the ingenuity of her escape, Fran Benedetto is certain of on…

The Christmas season is supposed to be full of joy, but not for Mark Smart. Life had dealt him one blow after another until one snowy November night, when he finds a beautiful young woman who will change his life forever. Macy Wood has little memory of her birth parents, and memories she'd rather forget of her adopted home. A Christmas ornament inscribed with the word "Noel" is the only clue to the little sister she only vaguely remembers, a clue that will send her and Mark on a journey to reclaim her past, and her family.

Thoughts: I had read this book about 4 years ago and actually liked it. Now, I don't know if I like it as much. I still enjoyed the story and read things I hadn't realized had happened in the book. Still was an e…